Alexander Fraser Tytler:
The other neighbors would outvote the selfish property owner to keep their neighborhood from being overrun with liquor stores and pawn shops. A homeless guy might vote for it in order to have another place to buy liquor or pawn his stolen items. A renter doesn’t care because his lease is up in 4 months.
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My problem with jtgain’s argument is twofold. Practical, because a homeowner’s individual economic interest may not be the best interest of the entire community; and ideological, because people who live in a community have interests beyond the simple market value of their home.
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No each individual doesn’t have the interests of the community at heart, but the collection of property owners in a community certainly do. And as I said above, the better the community thrives, the property values increase.
“Sure, some of my best friends are (…whatever…), but when they start moving in, my property values go down!”
Well, it presumably wouldn’t be just one person against the whole neighborhood. Figure that it will be one side of the street against the other.
A renter has a financial stake to stay, because moving costs money.
You don’t realize any profit from a home until you sell it. For people who want to stay in a neighborhood, the money that they’d get if they sold is just an idea. Those are the people (owners and renters) who will work for the long-term benefit of the community, because they plan to be there for the long term to enjoy those benefits. People whose only interest is in the market value of their home are already planning to cash out and leave.
What, people who buy houses can’t sell their houses and buy houses elsewhere?
I disagree. The only way this argument makes sense is if you accept the premise that property owners have different interests than renters have. If their interests were identical, then they’re be no point in arguing about whether or not renters could vote. In fact, property owners would presumably be happy with a government in which only renters voted because the renters’ interests would be the same as the property owners’.
So there must be one set of interests that property owners have and one set of interests that renters have. And where does that leave the common interest? I say the common interest is the combined interest of the property owners and renters - they all live in the community so the common interest is the collective interests of all community residents.
So which do you feel is most likely? Property owners representing the interest of property owners and renters? Renters representing the interests of renters and property owners? Or property owners and renters collectively representing the interests of property owners and renters? I think it’s the third option. Because if you can’t trust renters to represent property owners, how can you trust property owners to represent renters?
Well, that’s who it’s usually attributed to, although the earliest actual citation anyone’s found seems to be a letter to the editor in the Daily Oklahoman in 1951. Not that it’s actually true in either case.
Yes, yes, good one. As you doubtless know:
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If he had he would have been wrong. The process described in the “Tytler Cycle” has never happened in any republic in history.
So corporations that don’t pay taxes should be prevented from lobbying and donating to political campaigns. Can’t stop them from voting since they are not people and can not vote. How about a limit on tax escapement for corps. That is where the money is. Well that and rich with tax shelters and offshore bank accounts.
As I would have known had I accepted as valid the Wiki article on Tocqueville listing it among quotes often misattributed to him. Thanks for the correction.
However it is still good to beware of appeals by those who wish to “bribe the people with their own money” (the usual phrasing of the Tocqueville misquote).
[shrug] A candidate who promises to bribe me with the rich guy’s money is worth voting for, even by objective disinterested standards.
And let’s just list all those countries which were former democracies which have been re-invented as dictatorships, and ultimately monarchies. I’m sure we can do this from memory…
Ok, GO!
Rome . . . France . . . Does Haiti count? . . . Not Athens, anyway (the fake Tytler quote was supposedly about Athens).
Speaking of Athens – Greece seems well on the road to this right about now.
It’s not like they ever did pay income tax. “Income tax” has been collected on upper margins since the beginning, & was not intended to be universal in the first place.
“Payroll taxes” are on income in the form of wages and salaries, and are paid by a larger proportion of society. People who aren’t paying payroll taxes have very low wages and salaries, and the “blood from a stone” truism holds.
If the masses are so untrustworthy, would not an elite also be untrustworthy? Why is it OK for someone who makes “my income or higher” to wield the power of the state to his personal advantage, but not some poor homeless person?
If one wants to draw a correlation between abject poverty and mental illness, perhaps they can justify it in their own minds. But the poor are not all especially mad, nor the mad all especially poor.
Well, that’s sort of circular.
“The poor are too dumb to have the franchise, because they’re poor, and we’re defining mental competence by ability to make money.”
What was it the Yardbirds said?
Can you condemn a man if your faith he doesn’t hold
Say the color of his skin is the color of his soul
And call a man a fool if for wealth he doesn’t strive?
Then, mister you’re a better man than I
Should a mendicant have the vote? How about a woman who devotes her life to the church, or to volunteering? How much money do I have to make to be able to vote on policy?
For that matter, how much does ability to make good policy really overlap with ability to make good money? A selfish man may make a decent living and be a lousy citizen. A selfless man could be the opposite.
Really, you’re restricting the franchise based on something that’s at best irrelevant to a lot of policy about justice, the environment, and so forth.
As a practical consequence, of course, you end up with the problems identified in the OP, and in Polycarp’s post #3. A class who are elite and deemed competent, and whose wealth (or other qualification for franchise) is jealously guarded as key to their franchise, lording it over disenfranchised poor helots, or whatever we call sub-citizens.
Dude, I have skin. Just being alive and in this country means I have skin, literal skin, my skin, in the future of this country.
This isn’t a baccarat table we’re talking about. This is the body that makes law, law for all of us.
Let the financiers go off to some desert town and steal from each other 'til they die. But Washington shouldn’t be their table game.
Point of information: Old-stock Mormons are almost entirely of English descent, not “Swedes or whatever.”
Oh, by the way…
Sweden, since my (not Mormon) ancestors left it, has actually turned into a huge safety-net country. England is still trying to be halfway classically liberal. Guess which one has more class tension and problems with endemic poverty.
Work for whom? Who gets to say, “This work is sufficient to gain you franchise,” what does he get out of it, and how does he get the “super-franchise” to bestow franchise?
Yeah, that’s the part I like. The, “Come the revolution you’ll be up against the wall,” part. Go ahead and disenfranchise me! All that means is that the electoral system is completely not on my side, & I have no more reason to deny my real natural power: the power of violence and threat.
More pragmatically, I don’t think a society with a universal franchise will actually give it up. Debate on, “whom we will disenfranchise,” is based on a pipe dream.
The real problem is that some people are convinced to be ashamed of their franchise & either don’t use it or use it to vote against their own interests. And even that would be OK if it were disinterested, in the interest of justice or a better world. But often they thus vote for the interests of those who are not so selfless & accept that voting, lobbying, punditry, and political advertising are just more behaviors to which one should rationally apply self-interest.